392,350 papers found

INTRODUCTION: Ophthalmic complaints account for a substantial proportion of presentations to emergency and acute eye care services, yet initial assessment or referral is frequently performed by non-ophthalmologist healthcare professionals. Previous single-centre studies suggest that one-third of referrals are incorrect…

INTRODUCTION: Postoperative pain is common after surgery, with a high incidence and risk of becoming chronic. Current multimodal analgesia has drawbacks, including limited efficacy from single agents and opioid side effects and addiction risk. These issues have led to opioid-sparing multimodal analgesia. Transcutaneous…

INTRODUCTION: Unexplained infertility affects about 30% of couples seeking help for infertility, yet the optimal ovulation induction strategy remains largely unclear. Letrozole, clomiphene citrate and gonadotropins are widely used, alone or in combination, with or without intrauterine insemination (IUI), but evidence o…

Fractional Polynomial (FP) models are widely used in survival analysis for health technology assessment and network meta-analysis (NMA). However, current implementations rely on a fixed set of pre-specified powers, which may constrain model flexibility, limit predictive performance and increase computational cost in Ba…

INTRODUCTION: Hip fractures are a prevalent type of fracture and a leading cause of disability and mortality among older patients, imposing a substantial burden on both families and society. As surgical intervention is considered the primary means of improving patient outcomes, perioperative optimisation management is…

INTRODUCTION: Videolaryngoscopes are recommended as the top preference for tracheal intubation in adults, children, infants and neonates, and even in patients with anticipated difficult airways, since they are generally easier to use and quicker to master than fibreoptic bronchoscopes. Compared with standard videolaryn…

BACKGROUND: Resilience can protect individuals from the negative impact of adversity, facilitating a swift recovery. The exploration of protective factors contributing to resilience has been a central focus of research. Self-compassion, a positive psychological construct that involves treating oneself with kindness, ho…

INTRODUCTION: Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is a parasitic disease with an estimated 30 000 new cases occurring annually. Despite anaemia being a common haematological manifestation of VL, the evolution of different haematological characteristics following treatment remains poorly understood. An individual participant da…

BACKGROUND: Alzheimer's disease is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by progressive cognitive decline and dysfunction of independent living ability, with huge economic and healthy burden worldwide. However, there is still a lack of effective long-term drugs to improve cognitive function and reduce or halt disea…

BACKGROUND: Respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) is the most common cause of respiratory failure in preterm infants. Treatment consists of respiratory support and exogenous surfactant administration. Commonly, surfactant is administered intratracheally. However, this requires airway instrumentation and subsequent fluid…

BACKGROUND: Network meta-analysis (NMA) simultaneously synthesises direct and indirect evidence on the relative efficacy and safety of at least three treatments. A decision maker may use the coherent results of an NMA to determine which treatment is best for a given outcome. However, this evidence must be balanced acro…

BACKGROUND: Occupational exposure to cytotoxic drugs is associated with various unfavorable health outcomes. This protocol reports a methodology for a systematic review and meta-analysis that aims to systematically review the published literature and quantify the level of environmental contamination of healthcare setti…

INTRODUCTION: Internal temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorders are present in approximately 80% of patients with symptomatic temporomandibular disorders. Among the minimally invasive therapies, we find the intra-articular infiltration of substances, such as corticosteroids, hyaluronic acid or platelet-rich plasma accom…

Precision medicine research often searches for treatment-covariate interactions, which refers to when a treatment effect (eg, measured as a mean difference, odds ratio, hazard ratio) changes across values of a participant-level covariate (eg, age, gender, biomarker). Single trials do not usually have sufficient power t…

INTRODUCTION: Sickle cell disease (SCD) is the most common inherited disease worldwide. The greatest disease burden is seen in sub-Saharan Africa. Early diagnosis and improved care of people living with SCD have led to an increase in the number of women with SCD reaching the reproductive age. Iron deficiency anaemia re…

BACKGROUND: Tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis in children is a major challenge with up to 94% of children with TB treated empirically in TB high-burden countries. Paediatric tuberculosis (PTB) remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality globally, particularly in developing countries. Most deaths/morbidity from TB in pae…

OBJECTIVE: To test rapid approaches that use Drugs@FDA (a public database of approved drugs) and ClinicalTrials.gov to identify trials and to compare these two sources with bibliographic databases as an evidence base for a systematic review and network meta-analysis (NMA). STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: We searched bibliog…

BACKGROUND: Achilles tendon ruptures are a common injury and are increasing in incidence. Several management strategies exist for both non-operative and operative care, with each strategy offering unique risks and benefits. Traditional pairwise meta-analyses have been performed to compare management strategies; however…

BACKGROUND: Overuse injuries are reported to be more common than acute trauma in children and adolescents, causing pain and reduced function. The most common is apophysitis - a traction injury to the apophysis in growing individuals. The duration of symptoms reported in the literature is between 6 weeks to 6 …

BACKGROUND: Head and neck cancers form a significant share of all cancer incidences worldwide. Though treatment modalities exist, post-treatment recurrence and survival rates in recurrent patients continue to be high. MiRNAs offer an effective method of estimating the probability of recurrence and survival of HNC patie…